so now i'm in seattleville with a backpack and less than 20 bucks...so of course i go to pike market...fish throwers...too much food i can't afford...somehow i end up in a catholic church where there is supposed to be food and shelter...it is on or near the old "skid road" where back during the logging hey-day after the trees were all felled the unemployed loggers set up their tents along the log "skid" where the logs slid down into the bay...thus the term "skid row" came to describe any place where there were a lot of people "living rough"...i forget whether i got a meal or a bed at the church place but while at the pike market i see a fellow selling "rubbings" of native petro-glyphs from the coasts of alaska and canada made with colored wax on fabric...i thought they were pretty pricy but probably considering how difficult they were to get to i suppose they were reasonably priced...and besides they guy says he was a trained anthropologist...who knows...but we struck up a conversation and he said i could live in his basement if i would help him when it came time to build plywood forms and pour concrete walls for the basement...i agreed and settled into a rather chilly and damp fossorial setting under his house...after talking to some old guys in town they said i should go to ballard to see if i could get on a salmon boat in alaska...i took one of the many buses to ballard and came to realize that seattle is really a collection of many different communities...the "U" district, "central", ballard, queen anne" and many more...i was told that the salmon processing boats would not be hiring until the middle of june or about then...so day labor looked like the best bet...then it came time to pour the concrete walls which did not go so well as the plywood forms blew apart with the weight of the concrete...not a pretty sight...wet concrete all over the place...and the home owner thanking me for telling him we had plenty of nails in the plywood...i think he was being sarcastic...anyhow i am not exactly sure of the sequence of events but i moved into the loft of a small house in the back and met another anthropologist who was renting another house...this guy was into music and said he was going to see Guy Clark in a small place in town...i asked for a ride as i was a big fan...Guy Clark performed with his son and it's a good thing his son was there as Guy was not at the top of his game...but he performed some of his well known tunes and i was happy...later i also went to another place to hear two guys called "Hot Tuna" who used to play with "jefferson airplane" until airplane changed to starship and went too electric for Jorma and jack who stayed acoustic and the rest is history...i still think jorma is as good a guitar player as robert johnson...it was a place with no seating...so i stood as close to the stage as i could get...a great yet tiring concert...eventually i ended up in the King Baldy Hotel where a fellow who had the bunk above mine and who would smoke a bit of hashish in the evenings asked me if i wanted a job on a salmon boat...he said he did not think he could pass the piss test he needed to take the next morning and if i would go to this address and see this man he might hire me in his place...i went there and after talking to the hiring guy i was told that i was hired and would fly out of sea-tac airport the next morning and i needed rubber boots and a raincoat...i hit the ground runnnig and managed to get to the airport with my gear, board the plane and fly to anchorage and then to dutch harbor to get on the "Storgefiord" which i think is "slave ship" in some scandinavian language...we started out innocently enough...12 hour days as we headed west for ikigik a remote place at the mouth of a river where the fishing had been restricted for the last five years because they had overfished and wiped out the salmon and there were lots of processing boats like ours trying to buy whole salmon from the gill-netters and we the slaves would "H and G" them (head and gut them and put them in metal pans and into the freezer...then the salmon began to "run" thick and fast and the 12 hour days increased to 13, 14, 15,16,17,18, 19,20,21,22,23,24...up and working for 24 hours! and then 2 hours rest then more hours! now the the names of my crew members are forever scalded into my synapses...the PTSD i feel when i see a whole salmon causes my back to hurt and my arms to ache...there was david another processor, and Russ T the deck-hand, who actually had a merchant mariners document so he got paid more for doing less work, and then the "cambodian" prick...not a very good worker but he was the "asian connection" as it turns out...and he took a shower when no one else could as the water was being rationed...and of course "Todd the Bod" who was the body building mate who brought up his body building girlfriend who was actually the most pleasant person on the boat...but she caught pneumonia and had to fly back to oregon where she was a competitive weight lifter...and nice to look at...but her boyfriend used to come down to where we were cutting up fish and he would work real fast to show us how it could be done...but he got plenty of rest and never spent more than half an hour processing fish...what a jerk...and they fired the black cook and brought on a woman named "Stephanie" (probably not her real name) she had a "tankerman" endoresment so she was qualified to fuel the ship...like that was a real steady job..NOT!...the food was no better than the other cooks and at least he would show up in the processing room and give a hand when he could... my arms hurt so bad that i could only rest while sitting up on the edge of the bunk...the engineer said it was "tendonitis" or strained tendons from holding the knife for so long...and he said it would only get worse...not a happy future...the engineer was a norwegion named "GEAR" which is a good name for an engineer...and i would recommend that if you need to go to sea...go to sea with a norwegian...still lots of viking blood and world class seamen...i brushed against gear as i came up the stairs in the engine room...he was hard as a rock...and probably 20 years older than me...the chief slave driver was captain codington or something like that...he was abused on fishing boats as a youth and was determined that others must be abused also...pay their dues and all that crap...somewhere along in here at midnight i turned 40 years old...and i realized my retirement plan needed some more planing...then there were problems and the three other boats owned by the same company the (company was from Sweden as it turns out) all came together and one of the other boats had a leak in their freezer and their fish thawed out and began to rot so they transfered them to our boat which had a good freezer and eventually we met up with a boat in the middle of nowhere with a non-american flag and an all asian crew and we did an "off-load" of all our fish to the asian boat...now all the hard work had been done and they did not want the likes of me to split the money with...and the cambodian prick went with the asian boat as well...they probably had him tortured and killed when they realized they had been sold rotten fish...but maybe that's a popular thing with them...but probably not...well after about 6 weeks i had worked all the 20 hour days i cared to work...and it was agreed that i should pack my pack and get out at Dago creek...i got in the rowboat and was told that i should walk down the trail until i got to a cleared spot in the tundra like and wait for a two seater plane which would pick me up...soon a native guy came driving up on a 4 wheeler with a 12 gauge shotgun...he said i should ride with him...i asked him why that was...and he points to the ground and says "look, bear tracks, a mother and a baby!" i agree and hop on the back of his machine...then he puts me off at the edge of the pick-up spot...eventually a small plane arrives...as we fly over the vastness of alaska the pilot keeps pointing to moose which are standing next to the many small lakes...we get to King Salmon and i wait for a 4 seater plane...while i am waiting i decide i want to eat someting that was not "boat food"...but even a burrito is 13 bucks...i decide to eat nothing...i am a pretty traumatized person by now and in the anchorage airport i look around for someone i could kill...or at least maim...but i want to revel in my coming paycheck more than i want to kill and maim...physical stress has an interesting effect on people...so does money...we get back to the sea-tac airport and i get back to the King Baldy Hotel and rent a bed...the typical scam in the salmon processing business is you get the sucker to sign a contract to work 90 days then make it so hard that the sucker cannot work that many days and the sucker has to pay for the transportation costs to and from the boat...i went to the office where i was hired and told them that i worked more than anyone and if i did not get all my money i would make trouble...so they cut me a check and it looked bigger than what was in my pocket but not really worth the trauma of the slave ship...i think $2800 bucks...and a woman in black asked me if i wanted to sign up for another tour..."now that you know the ropes"...i think not i said...i was still worn down and needed to rest someplace cheap and i figured i would go to Mexico and lay around...i had never spent any time there and really did not have a clue...i was to get a real lesson in questionable safety...
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